


Empire

by KyraAnnCoombes



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/M, Loosely Batverse Inspired
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 16:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2075583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KyraAnnCoombes/pseuds/KyraAnnCoombes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing happens in DC that Willas Tyrell doesn't know about. Well, that Vigilance doesn't know about, but that's who Willas is by night: He coordinates and informs the Knight and Maiden, DC's dynamic crime-fighting duo, who also happen to be his super-powered little brother and sister. So when a new hero the papers call the Winter Wolf starts hitting mob hideouts he hasn't confirmed based on intel from a mysterious and anachronistic source, he definitely starts paying attention.</p>
<p>By day, though, he's just an executive in the family business, spending an awful lot of time with pretty young socialite Sansa Stark, and juggling pressures from his matchmaking family and time-consuming secret hobby. The deeper he digs into the Wolf's activities, though, the more his daily life—and that of his family and loved ones—gets turned upside down.</p>
<p>[Loosely batfamily comics-inspired superhero AU started for Sansa/Willas Week that wasn't posted on time due to a host of personal reasons.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empire

Willas slipped on his headset and twisted in his wheelchair, first left, then right, to crack his back. Loras and Margaery had gone out last night without his help, and he needed to look over security tapes, traffic cameras and social media to collect data for a report. The Google alerts he had set for their aliases had gone more wild than usual, but since they hadn't called, texted, or showed up bloodied and bruised in the Hightower, he assumed they were fine, and went about preparing breakfast in his operations room kitchenette. "ROSIE," he began, waking up his integrated operating system, "pull up trending news reports for the Knight and the Maiden, make sure you get a variety of coverage." The display on the table lit up dark green and gold, and ROSIE began opening a few blogs and news sites while he poured cereal. He rolled to the table as the system asked if he'd like her to read the stories to him. "Not today, ROSIE," he dismissed, enlarging the first source and pouring his milk.   
  
One could say heroism was the Tyrell family business. Well, the new, secret family business—sustainable agriculture was the meat-and-bones, so to speak, that their fortune was built on—but heroism was a business nonetheless. Willas had never really been as directly cut out for it the way his other siblings had... Loras, though vain, had lightning reflexes, and Margaery'd been reading minds since before she could read words off a page. His brother Garlan hovered right at the border of super-human strength, while Willas was a decently perceptive empath. Garlan's skills had made him a brilliant athlete, but through adolescence Willas's 'power' had mostly served to make him feel awkward and overwhelmed in social situations. Its reliability varied depending on the person he was reading, but it had its uses. Willas's senses were the only reason Margaery didn't have 100% control over the family: he could feel her aura around a person she'd been manipulating [or, as she liked to call it, kindly influencing], and had more than once been a bit petty in outing her schemes. The overwhelming nature of his ability was one thing that had pushed him, an introvert from a young age, towards computers and software instead of the team sports and clubs his siblings had favored. Now, at 28, he had constructed a better intelligence system than most industrialized countries had, and, as Vigilance, he was able to enhance and oversee his younger sibling's operations while doing some crime-fighting of his own.   
  
The first source was a blog that reported exclusively on superhero goings-on, though the kids who ran it weren't savvy enough to have caught on to him yet. That was how he liked it.  _Let the kids in capes be click-bait_ , he thought. He'd never liked the spotlight anyways. The headline read "NEW HERO (???) INTERCEPTS KNIGHT AND MAIDEN MAFIA BUST" in tacky comic book lettering. The blog's layout was terribly gauche, and Willas had on several occasions debated the merits of opening the site's code and changing it himself, but what was important this morning was the content. He skimmed, but the headline proved to be the most useful information. New hero, no pictures, gender not determined, grey bodysuit. No kills, weapons unspecified. Loras and Margaery would still be asleep even if they hadn't been out last night, so he looked at some other sources for more information. One news site had a picture of Margaery floating with a shadowed figure in the right corner, and if Willas was judging the perspectives right, this new hero was close to Loras's height, and slim—though that could be a trick of the poor photo—but nothing else was easily made out. He pulled the address of the raid off another news article and pushed his empty cereal bowl aside, using both hands to access his organized pathways into city traffic cams and public network metadata.   
  
Nothing unusual. He saw Loras and Margaery ride in together, but the new hero wasn't anywhere he could see, before or after his brother and sister. "Not on street level, then?" Weather reporters had city-top cameras and satellites he could check...his headset buzzed gently. "Your father is calling," ROSIE announced.   
  
"Good morning, Will!" his father said when he answered. "Busy this morning?"   
  
Willas threaded his fingers into his curls. "As busy as the Knight and the Maiden were last night, I reckon," he said pointedly. There were some heroes who didn't even know their own alter-egos, but Mace and Alerie knew exactly what their children got up to—Alerie even embroidered the floral filigree that Loras had insisted on for his and Marg's outfits—the family was too close to have not found out eventually. Besides, they needed the family's wealth to bankroll their little project, and asking for discretion on military-grade tech caused markups one could hardly believe...   
  
"Oh?" There was perpetually a hint of chuckle in his father's voice, even when he attempted to scold them as children. As a father, it had made him a touch indulgent, but as a businessman, combined with his friendly Virginia drawl, it gave competitors a false sense of security that Mace was more than happy to take advantage of. "I haven't seen the papers yet."   
  
"I'll send you some links when I'm done reading. What's up?” His father didn’t just call to check up during business hours…  
  
"I'm sure you're familiar with Tully Aquaculture?” Mace dangled casually.   
  
 _There it is_. "Loosely. Big name in sustainable fishing, presences in the Mississippi River Delta and Pacific Northwest?"  
  
"That's them. Some of their smaller competitors are collapsing and they're looking to make a presence on the East Coast, their Brand Officer just moved to DC to start looking for opportunities."  
  
"Right..." Willas didn't need his abilities to feel the pitch his dad was building, but failed to see how it was relevant to his very internal position within Reach.   
  
"...And I was wondering if you could meet with her this afternoon, get a feel for what her plans are. Plant seeds for a partnership or two, you get the idea."   
  
Willas sighed. "Isn't that more of something a VP of Business Development should be doing?"   
  
"Garlan's not back from China for another two days, and I want to strike while the iron's hot." It was an excuse, and a flimsy one at best.   
  
"Your other children do sales and marketing, you know. Why are you  _really_  asking me?"  
  
"Damned psychic kids," Mace grumbled, trying again. "She's just broken off an engagement with the little shit from Lannister Luxuries, and it wouldn't hurt you to go to lunch with a pretty girl your age every once in a while. Talk to you later, mother sends her love." He hung up without giving Willas a chance to say no.  
  
By the time he'd done his physical therapy and gotten out of the shower, his dad's secretary had sent him a reservation confirmation for a hip new restaurant in Penn Quarter and a link to the Tully girl's Twitter. He hadn’t looked, of course—well he had, but only for long enough to determine that no matter what his father had said, this girl was decidedly not his age, at which point he felt creeped out and closed the page—he had more pressing matters to deal with. ROSIE had compiled a few rooftop clips for him to sift through looking for the new hero, but this new hero apparently didn’t want to be noticed. Willas was able to parse that the new guy had some moderate gymnastics skills…no circus performer, to be sure, but certainly someone who knew their way around a handspring or two. News pieces published since he’d left his workstation were reporting a likeness to a wolf, but the first report of any new hero was conjecture at best. Resources nearly exhausted, he sidelined the new hero and compiled his basic report of Margaery and Loras’s outing, leaving space for their comments [if there were any, which he doubted…the night sounded very cut-and-dry].  
  
“What’s the weather like, ROSIE?” he asked, rolling from his workstation to his bedroom.   
  
“World weather report, beginning with—“  
  
“—Just for DC please, ROSIE. What’s the weather in DC, for this afternoon?” he corrected his imprecision, smiling at the cool and even tone of his software.   
  
“High of 40, low of 29. Cloudy. Snow.”  
  
“Snow?” It wasn't unheard of for snow to fall in the last week of November, but it wasn't exactly normal either.  
  
"Just a bit, sir." ROSIE added, "Local weather reports indicate it will not stick to the ground. Winter is coming, it appears."

* * *

Willas rolled his eyes at the paparazzi outside the restaurant. Some senator or another was likely using the venue to carry on a misguided affair with a staffer, or some actor was visiting the city to lobby for a pet cause. The cold made his leg a hassle and a half to walk on with his cane, but with the wet ground and his own pride working against him he didn't want to risk using his chair.   
  
The hostess informed him that his guest was already seated, which surprised him—he was a quarter hour early, after all—and led Willas to their table. He felt her as soon as he saw her, a heady mix of loneliness and deep kindness tinged with grief that settled on her like a heavy crown. As they shook hands and introduced themselves, the paparazzi crowded around the restaurant's windows, and Willas quickly understood that there was no philandering senator or rich actor-vist to be found here. "Lovely to meet you, Ms. Stark. I apologize that it's me you're meeting—usually my siblings handle these sorts of things, and I'm afraid my analytics experience isn't very relevant—but I'm glad to have an opportunity to speak with you."  
  
She smiled. "Sansa is fine. I spent a summer interning in our data department when I was in high school, it was overwhelming! I spent half the time pretending I understood what all the little flashing lights meant, and the other half begging them to let me fax documents and do coffee runs. I was so terrible at it!" Her voice had the ghost of a Louisiana gentry accent, no doubt a product of her mother's family.   
  
"Isn't that what all internships are like?” he joked. She ordered them a bottle of a sweet, trendy new wine that he enjoyed more than he'd ever admit to his wine-snob cousins. "How's DC treating you so far?" he asked, eyes wandering to the telephoto lenses crowded against the window.  
  
"Just ignore them," she whispered before answering, "It's...certainly not Victoria—or Baton Rouge, for that matter—and I've barely had time to look for an apartment. It’s an adjustment, just like anything else.”  
  
The rest of the lunch was pleasantly uneventful in a way that set Willas’s teeth on edge. Something about her bubbly personality was way discordant with what he could sense about her: On the outside she was every bit the sort of hip, young socialite that Margaery and their cousins hung around, but beneath the surface was such a different story that he was having a hard time piecing it together. To distract himself, he tried to focus in on specific parts of what he could sense of her. She was something of a romantic, which came across as a deep but distant sense of longing in the center of his chest, and he could taste the lemon candy of her sweet tooth. He lingered a little too long on that, and when her trendy heeled boots clicked across the wood floors toward the restroom, he ordered her a lemon raspberry dessert. Introverted or not, the Tyrell Charm came naturally to him, and so too did the ability to use it to learn more about who he was charming.  
  
Her hotel was only a few blocks from the restaurant, and as they left, he watched her smile kindly at the small gaggle of photographers, waving for a picture. “They’re harmless if you give them what they want,” she explained, “it’s only when you start to try and hide that they get vicious.” As they walked, he noticed a slight hitch in her gait, and asked her if she’d hurt herself. “Oh!” she exclaimed, blushing more delicately than anyone had a right to, “I’m such an idiot. I’m trying to find a good Pilates studio, and I ended up in a more intense class than I could handle. Nothing a few days of good rest won’t fix.”  
  
Willas could tell that she was trying to be harmless, but couldn’t figure out why. They parted peaceably, and he couldn’t help but linger on her legs in dark grey tights as she walked away.

* * *

Two weeks and three more outings later, the papers were calling the new hero the Winter Wolf. There was a basic profile, a real picture…and not much else. Willas’s files were more complete: 5’10”, slim build, cowl like a snarling wolf. The cape was flashy and would get them in trouble sooner or later, but it also appeared to be mad of a puncture-resistant synthetic fiber that was good for the close-combat gang fights they'd been busting up.   
  
That was another thing. The Winter Wolf was raiding mob safe houses that even Willas hadn't confirmed. He suspected them, of course, but they were too close to the bottom of his list of perceived threats to warrant immediate investigation. This Wolf, though, had an information source, and it wasn't him. For now, then, the Wolf could only be watched, not trusted.   
  
He pulled up a map of the Wolf's raids, then layered another map of suspected safe houses over it. "Loras!" His little brother stirred on the sofa. “Hmm?” “Come here. Also, wake _up_. It’s four in the afternoon and you’re not a teenager anymore.” “You’d be napping too if you were up all night fighting crime in a silly outfit.” “I _was._  Not the silly outfit part, but remember that was your choice.” Loras offered a rude gesture, his other hand pushing his curls from his eyes. “What am I looking at?” Willas explained the map overlay, and expressed his suspicion of the Wolf’s information source. “What do you think?” Loras sucked in his top lip, thinking. It was an expression that had always made girls swoon—rather futilely, which was a separate issue—but had always reminded Willas of the face his brother had made as an infant when his diaper was dirty. “It could be someone with insider knowledge? Maybe someone was a part of things and is trying to clear a conscience. Or they’ve got someone else feeding them intel, like you do for us. Who else keeps track of stuff like this?”  “At the level I do? No one. That’s what I don’t understand. There’ve been a few people in the past…Back when the Targaryens were still doing weapons and defense contracting there were pretty solid rumors that they were watching and selling weapons to the mob, but they’ve been out of the picture since we were kids.” “They’re out of the picture. Maybe their intel guy isn’t.” It should have been a stupid suggestion. Willas meant to tell Loras it was a stupid suggestion, but he was already poking his head into Willas’s operations room fridge, rummaging around. “Don’t eat my almond butter with a spoon again, for god's sake.” Loras settled for the package of Oreos on top of the fridge. "I buy those for myself, you know," Willas said dryly. 

"If you bought them for yourself, they'd be locked up where I couldn't get to them. I'm going downstairs to play with the dogs and watch a football game, buzz ROSIE if you need me."

The door to the operations room shut, and Willas pushed his hair out of his eyes. He recognized the irony of his using their shared reflex to express frustration at his brother, but was too hung up on Loras's suggestion—his stupid, stupid suggestion—to truly appreciate it. There was no reason for someone to still be working for the Targaryens. Hell, there weren't any Targaryens to work for! The last one to speak of was Loras's age, and she was on the other side of the world, using what was left of her family's reputation as a springboard to produce privilege-laden documentaries. And the investors and shareholders had found greener pastures. Lannister Luxuries, the Baratheon's northeastern utilities monopoly...some even with Reach. There was no way anyone was still on payroll—there wasn't even a payroll to be on.

"ROSIE," he began, "let's look at mob activity from the 1990 fiscal year. I want media reports on crime trends, and I want to dig around the internal files pulled from Targaryen Corp when they were investigated by the SEC."

"Including confidential files, sir?" The software was programmed to ask for confirmation to break laws and compromise government security.

"Yeah. I want everything."

Eleven hours and three refreshers on ancient coding languages later, he found something. A path of folders and documents saved deep in an innocuous layer of the company's archaic servers were under security protocols that didn't exist until three years after the company was dissolved. In 2015, of course, they were nothing, but their existence was a puzzle. So, too, was the first file in the unlocked path, a .TXT titled 'SPIDER.'

"Open SPIDER.TXT, please, ROSIE," he commanded

"Sir, the file named SPIDER.TXT is not a text file. Shall I open it anyways?"

"Yes. Could be a hiccup on the person who first saved it," he offered, crossing his arms. _But this is too unique for coincidence,_ he thought.

ROSIE opened the file. It _looked_ like a blank text file from the early 90s...and then it didn't. An ASCII character spider descended from the top of the document on a virtual thread. It creeped to the bottom of the document, then retraced, changing directions and leaving a long row of underscores as its silk. It dawned on Willas that this spider was weaving a digital web, but he didn't understand the purpose...

"Security threat detected, sir," ROSIE announced.

"Explain," Willas ordered. "But close off the threat first."

The spider on the display froze. "The file named SPIDER.TXT includes a program that is attempting access," ROSIE said curtly. 


End file.
